by Rob Schmitz
Chinese typically saw male stylists as lazy waifs. There was a lot of downtime working as an apprentice hairdresser in China. I had noticed this at the barbershop I had frequented in Shanghai. Whenever I arrived for a cut, I sat behind customers who all wanted their hair done by the shop owner, not by his flamboyant-looking posse of young apprentices. The trainees—dropouts with hair dyed a rainbow of colors—often sat around gossiping, watching television, or styling each other’s hair, posing in front of the mirrors.
Big Sun was different, though. He used this downtime to read books by George Soros and Warren Buffett. His fascination with the markets went beyond the typical investment scams like Auntie Fu’s Gatewang. Zhao told me that when he bought stocks for her, she usually made money. “One time he made thirty-six thousand yuan in one afternoon!” she said excitedly. “People at the VIP trading lounge were all asking him for tips.”
Big Sun perked up. “At first I didn’t understand, so I learned by figuring out how to compare price trends. Now I’m starting to do some trading.”
Excited he had someone apart from his slack-jawed coworkers to talk with about this, he continued. “When the stock price dips below the company’s net assets, the real value of the company will be revealed. But here in China, what we know of many companies’ financial performance is usually fake, so then I turn to company financial reports, the book value per share, and the earnings per share. I look at the growth rate of its net assets, the scale of the investment, and occasionally I take a look at the candlestick chart.”
Zhao beamed at her son’s handle on all these foreign terms. “See how thoroughly he’s studied the stock market? He just keeps talking!”
Big Sun smiled shyly and Zhao paused to take a sip of her tea before turning on her son again. “He is smart, but he’s out of words when he’s dating a girl.”
The change of topic silenced Big Sun.
“He doesn’t understand a girl’s heart. He’s not good at dating.”
I turned to Big Sun. “Any prospects?”
“Mom’s introduced some girls from our hometown, and one of them seems nice. I’ll go back in two months and have a look and meet her parents,” he mumbled.
“We’re all going back home in May!” said Zhao excitedly; her nephew was getting married. “You should come, too. It’s only three hours by high-speed train. You can see how people in the countryside celebrate a wedding!”
“Do you have a photo of her?” I asked Big Sun. He showed me the girl’s WeChat profile photo.
She had pretty brown eyes. The rest of her face was covered with a Hello Kitty surgical mask—the type worn to protect against air pollution.
“This is the only photo I have of her,” said Big Sun glumly, nodding at his phone.
He’d spent five minutes talking to the girl at a cousin’s wedding the previous summer. The meeting was orchestrated by Zhao, her cousin who had married the tax official, and the girl’s parents. Big Sun and the girl didn’t object to a second meeting, so all parties involved put the couple on the marriage track.
“She’s very good at saving money,” Zhao jumped in, excitedly. “She’ll say, ‘I bought a turnip for half a yuan and that was enough for today.’ She gets by on soup each day—she only buys cheap stuff. A Shanghainese girl can’t compare with her.”
I looked at Big Sun for a reaction—thriftiness wasn’t exactly romantic, but it was a prized trait in China—yet his face revealed nothing. He was on a path to marry a frugal hometown girl he had spent five minutes with months ago. He had gotten to know her a little more over WeChat, scrutinizing her masked profile each time they texted.
In just a couple of months, Big Sun would return home and bring gifts to the girl’s parents. If they approved, the marriage of Zhao’s firstborn son would be sealed. Dowries would be exchanged, then the wedding, and Zhao could await her second grandchild. Her motherly duties fulfilled, she could finally stop worrying and be at peace. But there was still work to be done, and Zhao worried that Big Sun’s inexperience with matters of the heart threatened to unravel the whole arrangement.
Outside, a warm southerly breeze swept through the neighborhood, and the branches of the plane trees swayed back and forth in the afternoon sun, shadows dancing on the flower shop’s floor. Zhao leaned back on her chair and smiled, closing her eyes. Big Sun stepped outside to bask in the day’s remaining sunlight, looking pensive. It was the first day of spring. Big Sun would soon be married.
It was late afternoon. CK and I sat inside 2nd Floor Your Sandwich, staring out the window overlooking the Street of Eternal Happiness. Young office workers spilled out of the skyscraper across the street, set free from their cubicles for the evening. “I’ve never wanted to chase a stable life,” CK said, watching his peers jostling each other as they fought their way to the subway station, another workday complete.
CK observed them quietly. He was after something else. “I don’t know what, actually. Recently, I’ve had a problem. I mean, it’s not a big problem. I feel like I’ve always wanted to explore myself more and more, go deeper and deeper, and recently I’ve gotten a little bit…I just feel like I’m stuck.”
Whether it was from too much navel gazing or for other reasons, his sandwich shop hadn’t turned a profit since it opened. On days like this, CK didn’t seem to mind. He was selling enough accordions to pull in around 50,000 U.S. dollars a year. It was a comfortable salary that gave him the freedom to try out other endeavors, such as running an unprofitable second-floor sandwich shop, or sitting in the empty unprofitable second-floor sandwich shop, pondering the meaning of life. None of my older Chinese friends had the time to think about these things, but that’s why I enjoyed spending time with CK.
“It’s like when I play my accordion and something new comes out,” he said. “It’s a distinctive feeling. I call it ‘strength of breath.’ It’s like when you breathe, but you can’t catch a full breath.”
After wheezing through a winter during which the concentration of air pollution was twenty times higher than the level experts say is unsafe, I told CK I could relate to that.
“Dating is, well, I think there are a lot of interesting girls, but after I talk to them a couple of times, I quickly lose interest. I don’t know. Then I keep asking myself: what’s wrong? Because every time I feel something is wrong in my life, that means the real me is telling myself that it’s time to take one more step to improve myself.”
“So you’ve felt like this before?” I asked him.
“Yeah. And it’s always the same. My feelings go flat.”
“Like you’ve run out of desire or you’re not happy?”
“It’s like I could feel things before, but now I just feel numb. I can feel that something is going to happen inside of me soon.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It’s like when you play a videogame, right? And you’ve killed all the monsters, shot your way through all the levels, but now you have to fight with the big boss. And the big boss is powerful and you’ll have to dodge all his bullets. He’s got a lot of life and you’ll have to fight with him for a long time. I think now’s the time in my life when I have to face the boss. I have to fight him, kill him, and enter the next level.”
CK took a sip of his coffee while I thought about this.
“So,” I said slowly, “in real life, who’s the big boss?”
“Myself,” he said, staring into the sea of nine-to-fivers walking along the Street of Eternal Happiness below. “It’s always myself.”
GENERATIONS OF CHINESE had relied on family or the state to guide them through life. The men and women of CK’s cohort were the first to make life decisions on their own. They held the key to a future when individuals, with all their differences, would be given greater value in Chinese society.
The previous winter, I’d met a man named Li Zixing at CK’s café. The thirty-three-year-old had an intense gaze and was a fast talker, as if he were continually late for an appointment. Li p
romoted young Chinese writers through his website, China30s, and his work stirred the attention of retailers that market products to his generation. He was on the public speaking circuit, too. He started each event with a question: If you were to change your career, would you consult anyone in your family? “People who raise their hands to answer ‘yes’ were born in the 1960s,” Li told me, “but those born in the eighties hardly ever raise their hands.”
The 240 million people born in 1980s China are the country’s first generation born after China’s reform and opening, the first to adjust to double-digit economic growth, and the first born under the country’s planned-birth policy. Without siblings, their lives are the center of orbit for their two parents and four grandparents.
Despite being outnumbered six to one, they tend to ignore their elders’ guidance. Their parents and grandparents toiled most of their lives through Mao’s political campaigns without much of an education. Like Auntie Fu and Uncle Feng, they now struggle to cope with the free-market realities of modern China and they usually give lousy advice. “In many cases, we can’t explain simple ideas and decisions to our parents,” Li told me. “They just don’t get it.”
That’s why young Chinese like CK often make career decisions for themselves before giving their elders face. “We’ll usually discuss them later with our parents in a respectful tone that sounds like we’re seeking their advice,” Li said.
The generation gap is obvious up and down the Street of Eternal Happiness. Fu and Feng spent their working years tossed around by the state: first to Xinjiang, then back to Shanghai. The two have been struggling to adjust ever since: Feng, relegated to selling scallion pancakes; Fu, confounded by the wealth surrounding her, desperate to get rich quick, yet without the skills to do so. Compared to CK or Zhao, the couple seemed lost in a labyrinth of capitalism, relics of much simpler economic times when you did whatever the Party told you. “They’re the generation who never learned to swim,” Li told me, waxing metaphorical. “It was all a terrible memory for them. But what they don’t realize is that their children’s generation enjoys the freedom of swimming, and we don’t need life jackets.”
Li’s sense of freedom sounded a little naïve to me. Sure, his generation feels free to take a plunge now and then, but the waters of China’s economy can make for dangerous swimming. Many Chinese in their thirties are the sole source of income for their low-skilled parents and their own children. They’re under immense pressure to make money, and while they’re free to make their own decisions, their individualism has limits.
MUCH OF THE REAL ESTATE inside the blue-tinted glass skyscraper across the street from CK’s café—the building he sometimes stared at while thousands of his white-collar peers poured out each afternoon—is devoted to marketing to young people like him. Chinese millennials outnumber the entire population of the United States, and in 2012, companies spent more than 35 billion dollars advertising to them. The office tower stands forty-five stories, the tallest building along the Street of Eternal Happiness, dwarfing the tiny shops and eateries below.
From a corner office on the twenty-fifth floor, I could barely make out the glass roof of CK’s sandwich shop below. I was in the workspace of Tom Doctoroff, who manages a staff of two hundred hipsters at the China headquarters of J. Walter Thompson, one of the oldest advertising agencies in the world. For fifteen years, he has helped drive the golden era of advertising in China, endlessly trying to figure out what makes young Chinese like CK tick.
There are conflicting goals, Doctoroff believes, inside every Chinese. “It’s a tension between upward mobility and ambition on one hand,” he explained to me, “and on the other hand, a need to master a system, as opposed to rebel against it; a need to navigate a mandated order to climb the hierarchy of success.”
Doctoroff is a plain-speaking Midwesterner. He lit up a cigarette after his succinct summary of what was inside every Chinese heart. I thought about how his theory applied to the people I knew along the Street of Eternal Happiness. Across the street at the sandwich shop, CK’s struggle with the system was not a longing to defeat it, but to control and master it, navigating it successfully on his terms so that he could use it for his own means. Farther down the street, Zhao had left her home village and had astutely navigated China’s constant economic shifts all the way to her corner flower shop. She had made sacrifices along the way, but with each step she gained a greater understanding of the system that she would pass on to her sons. In the end, the risks were worth it: Her family was better off, and her grandson was beginning his life in a much better place than a run-down coal-mining town.
Doctoroff believes the priority on safety, for yourself and your family, marks the main difference between Chinese and Americans. “As Americans, we’re raised to believe that self-expression is good,” he explained. “It’s not dangerous.”
Americans are encouraged to define themselves independent of society. The basic economic unit in the United States is the individual, and American institutions are built to harness and develop the economic power of the individual. In China, on the other hand, the basic economic unit has traditionally been the clan, whether it’s the family or the Party itself. Individual Chinese often don’t feel like they’re in complete control of their own destinies, and they don’t necessarily believe the future is going to be safe.
The ads Doctoroff’s team develops for Chinese millennials high above the Street of Eternal Happiness are produced to convey a sense of risk, rebellion, and self-expression, but the end result is always the same. In a television commercial his team developed for the Ford Focus, a group of young artists paints a mural in a parking lot. Their friend drives up in a Focus, a girl standing on the scaffolding turns to admire the car, and she accidentally knocks over a can of paint that topples over other cans, making a rainbow of a mess below. Their friend puts the car in gear and takes a joyride through the spilled paint, splashing it onto his friends as he speeds by, showing off the features of the car. The camera pans out and you realize all of this rebellion wasn’t wasted: with help from his new Ford Focus, he’s made a mural of his own: a colorful painting of an eye.
“At the end, it beautifies the parking lot,” said Doctoroff as we watched the commercial together, pausing at several points to discuss it. “It’s not a rebellion against the system. They’ve created something that’s worthy of admiration. Part of the challenge of doing communications in China is knowing how to balance the aspiration for individualism over the fear of rebellion, and that line is always moving forward in terms of how it can be expressed, but it has never turned from solid to dotted. So the idea that there is true individualism in China is something that I don’t agree with.”
Nearly all of Doctoroff’s employees were bright, young members of the post-’80s generation who graduated from the country’s top universities. They wandered in and out of his office as we discussed the commercials, curious about our conversation. Some of them didn’t share their foreign boss’s theory about individualism in China, and I found their insights on their Chinese peers just as interesting as Doctoroff’s.
The director of the agency’s planning department was one of them. Henry Chen grew up in Shanghai and had studied philosophy at Fudan, Shanghai’s top university. His hair was an inch longer than a buzz cut, and he wore stylish tortoise-colored eyeglasses. He stood at least a foot shorter than his boss, and he dressed in loose khakis with a tight-fitting cardigan over a T-shirt. He listened to our conversation while leaning against the doorframe to the office, one leg in front of the other, sternly looking at the floor.
At a break in the conversation, I asked for his opinion. Henry agreed with his boss that true individualism was hard to find in much of China, but that in the country’s wealthiest cities, things were changing fast. His take boiled down to simple economics. It wasn’t Chinese culture that was holding back true individuality and rebellion. It was a lack of money and opportunity. This was something CK believed, too.
I asked H
enry what he thought about Han Han, China’s most popular blogger at the time. Han Han was born in Shanghai in 1982 and was far and away the most influential member of the post-’80s generation. He was a professional racecar driver with a talent for writing. His novel Triple Door, on life in a Shanghai junior high, was China’s bestselling literary work in two decades. His online critiques of China’s government often ventured into dangerous territory, and Party censors removed many of his blogs from the Internet inside of China. CK enjoyed reading Han Han’s posts, but there was something about the Internet celebrity that didn’t sit well with him.
“I think Han Han is an opportunist,” Henry said. “He sells a dream of rebellion, but he is a typical Chinese. He was married at a proper age, he has a mistress who he is very proud of; he himself is not very rebellious from others. I just think he’s not very honest about himself. He just talks, talks, talks. He never does anything.”
Doctoroff listened to his employee with the grin of a proud father. “I think Henry is not a typical young Chinese,” he said. “I think he’s a romantic and a dreamer at heart. Henry believes more than I do that Chinese youth are becoming more individualistic in a Western way. The words he uses to describe Han Han are very interesting, because Han Han has disappointed him personally. I think that romantic dream of what individuals can be in China is still in Henry’s heart.”
Henry looked slighted. “I’m not that extreme. But I still think we are moving in a direction that has huge potential,” he said, speaking for Chinese youth.
I asked Henry if China’s hundreds of millions of young people would someday influence Western culture. This was something CK believed.
The question seemed to excite him. “We can, definitely through our talent, because for so many cultural and political reasons, our talents have been repressed,” he said. “And no matter what it is, technological innovation or whether it’s literature or philosophy and thinking, there will be a renaissance and it will come. Maybe that’s the dreamer part of me,” Henry said, smiling bashfully.
